Friday, October 12, 2012

Images from Paula Roland's Advanced Encaustic Monotype workshop

Recently I was able to spend a couple weeks in New Mexico culminating in taking Paula Roland's Advanced Encaustic Monotype workshop.  What a wonderful experience!  Paula is a fabulous teacher and was ably assisted by Hylla Evans.  Hylla's deep knowledge of color and paint-making added a great deal.  The other participants in the class brought  interesting ideas and work to share making for a tremendous, immersive art retreat with lots of interesting discussion of technique, materials and approach to art-making.  

I have been fighting with  being blocked for months  after completing a large body of work for a solo show.  Best possible cure:  surround yourself with other artists and wonderful teachers, bringing focus and clarity while exploring new ways to use a  medium I've worked in for many years. 

 Below are a few of the pieces created in that week in  Santa Fe.  They clearly continue to build on the aerial landscape theme I've worked with for  years. My interest in the form and meaning of landscape and  waterways continues.  I'm working to combine my  formal interests in painterly abstraction of landscape from on high with my concerns about climate change and how human intervention in the environment puts us all at risk.
big river bend, encaustic monotype on hosho
                                                                 
blue arcs, encaustic on kozo 
river branches I, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK
river branches II, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK


river branches III, digital print & encaustic monotype on Rives BFK


river and inset river, monotype and graphite transfer on Shikoku paper

green figures, rust ground, encaustic monotype on kozo
While in Santa Fe I was able to connect with two other artists who also work with aerial landscape with interest in both painterly concerns and environmentalism.  Jean Davey Winter is an English artist.  She found me online and we were lucky enough to overlap in Santa Fe. She had some interesting work with her - paintings on paper that folded like a map, expressive images of landscape from above.

Jean and I also met Jean Arnold.  Her recent paintings of strip mines painted from an aerial viewpoint are raw and political in tone - powerful and inspiring work.